The aim of the present study was to test the agreement between a new developed clinical examination method and two commonly used radiographic scales (Bergland and Chelsea) for assessing alveolar bone graft outcomes in the cleft lip and palate patients. This new clinical method consisted of: (1) Probing depth for the teeth adjacent to the cleft and (2) Residual defects at the bone graft site. Two trained examiners examined the subjects in the present study. The inter- and intra-reliability tests of the two clinical criteria and the two radiographic scales produced the excellent agreement level of Kappa values (0.85-1.00). Comparison of the “acceptable-unacceptable” proportions between clinical and radiographic examination methods using McNemar’s Chi-square showed non-significant differences (p-values 0.317-1.00), and good level Kappa values (0.68-0.77). It is suggested that the new clinical examination method could be used as an alternative screening tool for alveolar bone graft assessment.

Keywords: Alveolar bone graft, Clinical evaluation, Radiographic evaluation